Yup. After asking on this very thread "how many LA programs does one family need?" I sure did go to the HSBC and pick up Jot It Down and The Wand from Brave Writer. I have even justified why it's perfectly fine to have two completely seperate comprehensive LA curricula so well that I almost believe myself. I have a sickness. My homeschool shelf is FILLING with language related curricula and workbooks and activities and books and notebooks.

We don't get very long summers here, unfortunately. So my plan for our summers (this will be our first homeschooling summer, so take this with a grain of salt lol) is to continue with our math and language arts, and the rest will be outside exploratory time - nature journalling, running free at the beach time, hiking, etc. We are so lucky to live in a rural area with breathtaking natural beauty so we will capitalize on that. We've been working pretty hard during our "deep freeze" months up here, so come spring/summer we will be outside as much as humanly possible. We'll see how it works. But I don't want to follow a PS school year, I have never understood the long breaks to begin with.

LOL. I use plead the fifth all the time. We're pretty americanized up here ;)

So a few of the homeschooler moms in my town got together for a kid-free coffee chat last night. We started talking about curricula. The result? I have spent almost the whole day trying to justify purchases to myself that don't even make sense. We're using (and loving) LoE right now, I bought the entire shebang because with my son I know we will just tear through it at warp speed but it's really really working for him. Anyhoo, I dumped kind of a lot of cash. And here I am with OPGTR, FLL, and a bunch of other books in my cart on Amazon. It's a sickness, and it's untreatable at this point. I want BA, LoF, and I want Bravewriter. Like really, how many language arts programs does ONE family really need? When LoE covers it all, or at least all of what my kids are even ready for at this point. My god someone point me in the direction of a twelve step group for curricula junkies. Or point me in the direction of a money tree. Either or.

I'm having the same issue. I can't see if a thread has new posts, they are all "unhighlighted". Help?

Well, we are actually WORKING. The kids came home from PS in late September so we've been pretty laid back since then - deschooling, going down rabbit holes, just enjoying each others' company. But today ends our first week of "real work" and my kids just blew me away. I am SO HAPPY! We are doing LoE Foundations with both - oldest is flying through it, younger is moving at a more reasonably slow pace as she's only 5. But HOLY COW! This is one fantastic curriculum for him - yesterday, my son who normally is just paralyzed by any sort of language related work, says to me "man I love homeschooling" out of the blue as we're on the 4th lesson in a row from LoE. It keeps him busy, he's moving and having fun and his cursive handwriting is flawless (his public-school-taught printing is truly illegible). I had to force him to stop at the 70-minute mark yesterday because I was pooped - he loves this curric. We're using MM, he has some backtracking to do as his PS education was in a French-immersion school so he's having to get re-accustomed to thinking about the core subjects in English. But he is FLYING through it. Younger started 1st Grade MM this week. Both love the SOTW and want to do it every day. Its been a really over the top successful first week. I had to totally readjust my lesson plans because he doubled what I thought he would do in the first week! Crazypants. Now that the important subjects are falling into place, I'm finding myself wanting to add things in - so we're going to look at Bravewriter, some more lit read alouds and probably "do science" in a more focused way (currently, it's been just finding fun things to do but my daughter wants to "do science" with a book LOL). I got teary eyed yesterday at how well both of my littles worked this week.

I agree. A lot of what we are working on right now is sounds, hearing them and isolating them - there are so many activities to work deeper with phonemic awareness.

I haven't gotten there yet to judge how well it works but CVC reading is introduced in lesson 21 of Foundations A. After only learning a handful of phonograms this week my son (seriously struggling reader) is already making more sense of CVC words - so far the method seems to be working but this is the only we have used since leaving PS (where they used sight reading only). Not sure if that is helpful or not :)

I coughed up a good chunk of change for the whole Foundations curric. And being in Canada the shipping was quite high. But it's already worth it. It's nicely scripted but still a lot of ideas you can use to redo lessons if a little one needs more practice (my youngest for instance).

Both my kids have just started it and neither have any issue with learning the phonograms even after years in PS knowing the letter names. My oldest is sailing through it as he is an older struggling reader. My younger is moving at a lesson per day and both are just loving the curriculum. I'm a LOE fangirl after today's lesson - after the lesson my I-hate-anything-to-do-with-language son begged me to print some more handwriting practice paper so he could keep working on his cursive. He sat in on my youngers lesson instead of playing on his xbox that i offered - so he could practice more. Really that is just unheard of in my home. I am in love with this program.

I have never seen this. Do you use it along side SOTW? Or could it be used seperately. It looks interesting though.

AFAIK, just about any heating source will require more energy to reheat a cold house than it takes to just maintain one steady reasonable temp. Particularly if its sufficiently insulated, helping it to keep the heat in. We have electric heat and our bills would be ginormous if we continually turned the heat on and off completely every day. Same when I had gas forced air heat.

It is a great series and I haven't come across anything yet that will work better. It may not be truly secular OR truly Christian but it rides the line well enough that anyone can use it.

Hm I would have a hard time seeing SOTW as too secular. Here I am having worries that it's too Christianity-centric for our particular homeschool.

Maybe it's because we're still new to homeschooling, maybe it's because we recently pulled the kids out of PS where they were exhausted all the time, or maybe even because it was my 7yr old who initiated the talk about homeschooling - - but my kids tell me often "its great we get to homeschool eh mom? cuz we can 'x y or z'" I think it's because from the moment we talked about pulling them out of school, I made a point to always tell them - in a pointed way OR sometimes just in passing - how cool it is that we have a chance to school this way. Not everyone is able to make the choice to do this - and it's a big commitment, but we're really very blessed to have a chance to do this in our lives. I tell them as I pass them in our hallway or making dinner, with a rub of their hair, how happy I am that we get to hang out so much now. I'm grateful beyond measure for the chance to finally homeschool the way I wanted to from the beginning, and I think me sharing MY gratitude reminds them that they also have a lot to be thankful for. How long will this last? Who the heck knows. But for now, we are all deeply grateful for the chance to do this.

Oh small world. The first blog they linked is a friend of mine!! I love her blog. It was her who loaned me a copy of WtM which is really shaping our homeschool.

Today was our first "official day of actual homeschooling". The kids have been home from PS since late September, and we've been pretty relaxed - doing the deschooling thing, figuring out what we want to do, tinkering with some work when the mood hit us. But today - was the first day getting to use some of our shiny new curricula. It went really really well. My 8 yr old who is normally allergic to anything resembling schoolwork, really buckled down and even when he was feeling the burn, he just kept pushing on. My 5 yr old - I can't keep up with her. I am now frantically reassessing where she may need to start or how fast she may move through some of the work we'd planned for her. She begged for more math, begged to do just ONE MORE lesson of LoE, and at that point I was pooped haha. This week we are just kind of getting a feel for how we want to plan out our day, tinkering around with schedule. My son asked to do SOTW every day instead of twice a week, daughter wants more math and LOTS OF BOOKS. SO today went exceptionally well. I am really looking forward to tomorrow. We're just starting right now with SOTW, LoE, and MM with some random science experiment kits the kids got for xmas. May have to add some stuff in as we go, if they keep powerhousing through it the way they did today :)

I kind of see us as heading this way also. For me, I have a hard time with two kids who thrived in a rigid public school, to find ways to nurture their self-learning. It's almost as if that natural desire had already been kinda squelched out of them in their time in PS. So keeping some structure was a big deal to me, addressing my son's issues with reading was important to me. I've told them both that I want them to just love learning, and find things that spark something inside of them. So until I find that they are wanting to do that more than 'bookwork', I'll keep providing them SOME form of education and put a lot of subjects and content in front of them and hopefully they will find things that they get excited about and we can just follow that. I wasn't comfortable just throwing ourselves to the unschooling wind. And I think that the very best, most magical part of homeschooling is being able to say "hey this is what we want to get to, and look at all the ways we have to get there" and forging our own path. I love the premise of classical education, and for its rigidity I also see it as something that will allow us to rabbit-hole all we want. And it puts a LOT of really cool info in front of my kids and I'm already seeing their eyes light up about certain subjects. So all that rambling to say, again, I just think we have to find the path that we feel comfortable on, and to see the end goals and kind of work backwards - if we want to get to "X" end point, here's how we can get there. Maybe right now that looks like something structured and maybe down the road that will look like something wholly different. And in the end, how we label ourselves is the least important part of it all.

Honestly, to the 'average onlooker', they don't see the differences in the subcategories of "homeschooling". So to most people, I say we homeschool. However within the homeschooling community (at least the one local to me), people sometimes do categorize themselves. I'm eclectic (and I think to be honest, most people ARE eclectic homeschoolers as no one, at least that I know of personally, actually schools completely according to any one principle or belief system). I had just assumed when I pulled my kids out that we would unschool, but it turns out that they (and more importantly *I*) need some form of structure. So we do use some curricula, but its very much still child-led. If I had to accurately describe us, we're democratic homeschoolers. My kids get choices in how and when and where we learn - but sometimes there are decisions made by my fiance and I. We say "here is what we're doing" and they get a say in the particulars (even sometimes helping choose curricula). I have quite a few "true unschooler" friends. One is quite to the radical end, some are more middle of the spectrum unschoolers. They implement it beautifully, and their kids (of a good spread of ages) are amazing, bright, articulate, and just fun to be around. I however do not have it in me to constantly supply the tools and books and project materials to follow my kids' whims and fancies. So we do have to be a little structured in that. I think the most important thing I take from my unschooler mates, is the idea that I am on no one's timeline but my own. THAT is the beauty of homeschooling (in whichever flavour you choose to define yourself) - you can go down the random rabbit holes and pick up on things that are fascinating your child at that moment, and then get back to the "planned work" when you want to. Honestly, if you find a way to home educate/homeschool/unschool/whatever and it works for you - then it doesn't really matter what you label it. We all pull from a variety of places, and I have yet to meet IRL a family who sticks firmly to only ONE brand of homeschooling :)

On my phone so I can't edit. You could check out Parks Canada's website, it's the government body in charge of preserving our national parks. It has a "learn and discover" section on the site, activities to do. http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/kids/ You could also take a look at how our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is similar and/or different to your Constitution. I think tvoparents website has a cool section on civics for kids. For our history (in Kid friendly terms, but keep in mind our history is wrought with issues surrounding our treatment of first nations peoples not unlike that of the US also so alot of age appropriate history seems to gloss over that, but if its something you guys talk about it could be worth a mention.) http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/cgKidsAtlas/time.asp

Farley Mowat books are great Cdn fiction. There are the LM Montgomery books (Anne of Green Gables). Mordecai Richler has a couple of youth books I think. Underground To Canada is a fantastic one. If I think of others I will edit this post :)

Are you looking for book suggestions? What aspects of Canada particularly are you looking to talk about? Amazon has some good "kids book of..." books about Canada - geography, history, immigration, first nations peoples, etc. We are Canadian but my littles are just starting to understand geography and how city vs province vs country all works, so we picked up The Kids Book Of Canadian Geography. They are laid out like encyclopedias basically, not work texts or workbooks. It's a good starting point for us.

Day before yesterday it was -52C with windchill when we woke up. Yesterday a slightly better -43C when we woke up. Currently, it's snowing a lot and crazy windy BUT at least the snow brings the temps up a bit to -14C today which is liveable.

Is Ambleside not a Christian curriculum? Or is it easy to tailor that one to secular needs?

I haven't actually USED this, so take this with a grain of salt. Have you looked at the Global Village School curriculum? Essentially, it's a really big book list with a suggestion as to how to plan it out and implement it. I haven't found many reviews kicking around the net, other than the testimonials from their own site, but I have been emailing back and forth a little with GVS as I'm thinking about picking them up after the summer for both my little ones. Yes, it's $125-$175 for a book list, but honestly the time I'm spending to find living books that fit my particular ideals and values is worth the cost of the curriculum, I think. I'm going to try it with my 8yr old and see how I like it. But it is holistic, learning through reading and investigating and experiencing, and they offer suggestions for math/science/LA etc. I wish I could find someone who has USED it and has real experience with it (not just the testimonials on the GVS site).